This is the first collection of poems by Louise Glück, who was born in 1943 in New York. In 1967 she received a Rockefeller Foundation grant for her poetry.

Her poems deal in wastelands, the lost lives of cripples, the hopeless and loveless; yet her landscapes have a stern beauty, a mythic size that looms behind the everyday. Arid, merciless, stinging, yet full of life, these are strikingly original poems.